Hydrogen released during large impacts might have boosted Mars’s surface temperature above freezing for thousands or even millions of years, enabling liquid water to flow over the Red Planet.
planetary atmospheres
Posted inEditors' Highlights
Unprecedented Constraint on the Martian Mesopause Temperature
The middle atmosphere of Mars is a critical region influenced by both waves from below and solar radiation from above, but until now there have been very few observational constraints on this region.
Posted inEditors' Highlights
Callisto’s H Corona: Offspring of the Surface or the Atmosphere?
The mostly unknown Callisto’s H corona is created by a global tenuous H2 atmosphere and not by surface water as previously believed, providing the first evidence for H2 in Callisto’s atmosphere.
Posted inEditors' Highlights
Ozone, Water Vapor and Temperature: It’s a Complex Relation
Solar occultation observations from the ACS/MIR instrument provide coincident profiles of O3, H2O and temperature, shedding light on correlations and unveiling knowledge gaps in Mars’s photochemistry.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
A Unified Atmospheric Model for Uranus and Neptune
In a new model, three substantial atmospheric layers appear consistent between the ice giants.
Posted inNews
Diagnosing Neptune’s Chilly Summer
A pandemic project analyzing a trove of infrared images revealed an unexplained phenomenon taking place in Neptune’s atmosphere.
Posted inNews
Mars’s Dust Cycle Controls Its Polar Vortex and Snowfall
On Earth, the water cycle is a dominant climate force. On Mars, it’s the dust.
Posted inEditors' Highlights
Young Ponds on Mars
A detailed study of evaporite (chloride) deposits on Mars shows that small bodies of surface water persisted until about 2.5 Ga, more recently than previously thought.
Posted inNews
The Possible Evolution of an Exoplanet’s Atmosphere
Scientific sleuths explore data gathered trillions of kilometers away and put forth different, and often conflicting, ideas to reconstruct the gaseous envelope on a distant rocky exoplanet, GJ 1132 b.
Posted inEditors' Highlights
Martian Dust Activities Induce Electrochemistry
Amorphous materials generated from sulfur and chloride salts by electrostatic discharge in a Mars chamber suggest widespread electrical processes during dust activities.